Nissan and NASA have teamed up to work on a new kind of car battery, the Japanese automaker has announced.
The all-solid-state battery promises to provide a much quicker charge and be lighter yet safer than the current lithium-ion models.
The design is stable enough to be used in a pacemaker, and the completed battery will be about half the size of the current one.
It will also reach full charge in just 15 minutes, as opposed to a few hours.
Nissan said the new battery will have a pilot plant launch in 2024, followed by a product launch in 2028.
Nissan’s Corporate Vice President Kazuhiro Doi told reporters that Nissan and NASA needed “the same kind of battery”.
The carmaker and US space agency are using a digital database known as the ‘original material informatics platform’ to test combinations from hundreds of thousands of materials to find what works best, Doi said.
It will help the project to develop batteries that do not require the sort of rare metals and similar materials needed for li-ion batteries.
These materials are both expensive and have raised environmental concerns.
Other automakers are in the race for solid-state batteries
Nissan is not the only major automaker working on solid-state batteries.
Japanese rivals, Toyota, Germany’s Volkswagen, and US manufacturers Ford and General Motors are all in the race. General Motors and Honda have recently announced a partnership to work on next-generation electric vehicles (EVs).
EV specialists such as Tesla and Waymo are also adding to the competition.
Nissan said that it is extremely competitive and promised the new battery would be a “game-changer.”
The company also hopes that its experience developing the Leaf EV will stand it in good stead.
The Leaf electric car was launched in 2010 and has sold more than 500,000 models worldwide.
The EV’s battery has not suffered any major accidents on the roads and while it is different from the new solid-state battery, some parts of the technology, such as lamination of the battery cell, will be common to both.
There is a growing interest in EVs among consumers and global automakers, driven largely by concerns about fossil fuels and climate change.
Today’s news was brought to you by TD SYNNEX – the UK’s number one solutions distributor.
